Oral History
Ora Cogan stands in the clearing like a summer goddess draped in black satin
She lives in an old mining town in British Columbia after working as a silversmith and doing other cool shit
“It’s not just about dressing up in muumuus and playing a mandolin.”
I was living in rural Northern California the summer that Ora Cogan’s “Cowgirl” came out, and when I first heard it in my friend’s truck on our way to the river we were dead silent as we let it wash over us, absorbed in delicious loneliness. Now I am following the sound of her fiddle through Laurelhurst Park on a sunny spring afternoon in Portland. Amid the picnickers and the dog-walkers, she sits in the clearing like a goddess draped in black satin. Her dark eyes, framed by long, chocolate-brown hair, gaze at the instrument tucked under her chin, her cowboy boots kicked off to the side, a snake tattoo creeping up her leg. She pauses her reverie to greet me with affable warmth. I kick off my own boots to join her in the grass.
Raised among the rugged shores of Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, Cogan possesses the soulful disposition of someone who has spent her whole life humbled by the …
Losing My Edge
Upper-class digital nomads roam the desert like some long-lost plains tribe
Sad-dude sentiments meet lyrical playfulness in the dust
Indie Man Turns 30
My neighbor likes to park his vintage hot rod on the curb out front of his house. On Saturday mornings he removes the mesquite pods that drop onto the windshield from a nearby tree and he rinses the dust from the exterior with a garden hose. He opens the doors and wipes the seats with a microfiber cloth that’s been sprayed with a solution. He cleans under the wipers and around the hubcaps before he dries the exterior with a towel. Then he goes back inside his house. The hot rod is a turquoise Mercury Comet.
I live what Don Delillo calls “a quiet life in an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix.” I have lived here for three months, or 24 years, or since God breathed life into dust. I know my neighbor never takes his Comet out for a drive because my baby daughter and I observe it parked on the curb from the big bay window in our living room, in one-to-three hour intervals, every day, from 6:00 AM …
Thanksgiving Cranberry Report
Knee-Deep in the Icy Bogs
During the greatest October sports season in Wisconsin’s history, the Wine-Dark Land of UTIs
Will there be enough cranberry sauce this year?
I’m a woman. At times, I must call upon the cranberries. I have puckered my way through many quarts of sugarless juice, and popped plenty of encapsulated concentrations to flush infection from my urinary tract. But this time, curled over in agony on the floor of a hotel room next to SeaTac, I couldn’t dally around with folkways. I rushed to urgent care for a prescription to nuke my UTI.
The timing was uncanny. I was about to fly to the world’s cranberry Mecca, to investigate where cranberries come from and hunt them in their bogs, standing knee-deep in cold water in order to provide my best estimate of whether America would be properly sated come Thanksgiving, the holiday in which the majority of the country’s cranberry product is consumed. But I was on the verge of canceling my reporting trip, foiled by the very scourge that the tart red berry has historically cured. Shivering and shaking, …
